Maya, around age four, Athens, Ohio.
As a child Maya never dreamed of becoming an artist. She loved animals and planned to become a veterinarian when she grew up. She and her older brother, Tan, roamed the woods behind their house on Cable Lane in Athens, Ohio. She would sit quietly and watch the rabbits, squirrels, and birds. Maya didn’t have many friends. “So I made up my own world,” she says. In her bedroom she built paper houses and villages, and later she made things out of silver and clay. All these childhood experiences were to greatly influence her adult work as an artist and architect.
Maya Ying Lin was born on October 5, 1959. Her middle name means “precious stone” in Chinese. She and Tan grew up surrounded by art. “My father was a ceramicist and my mother a poet,” wrote Maya. Her parents both taught at Ohio University.
Every afternoon after school she and Tan walked over to their father’s studio. Maya loved to watch her father knead the clay, pound it, push it, and cut it through with wire. “He worked with it effortlessly,” she wrote. Maya’s father would let her play with clay. At home the family ate from stoneware plates and bowls that he had made. The glazes on the ceramics were the natural earth colors that Maya liked best—and still does.
Her mother, on the other hand, preferred red, the color that in Chinese tradition symbolizes good luck and happiness. Maya said, “My mother dressed me up in too many red dresses. I hate the color red!”
Maya’s parents had both been born in China. They had escaped to the United States in the 1940s during a civil war. From an early age Maya was very aware of her parents’ feeling that Athens, Ohio, was not really home. “For them, their true home, China, belonged to the past,” she wrote. Yet they didn’t talk about their history, and Maya didn’t ask questions. She didn’t know her grandparents or her aunts and uncles. “When I was little,” she said, “we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they’d be censored.”
Maya, around age one, with her brother, Tan, and their parents in their home in Athens, Ohio.
Although Maya says she comes from “two heritages,” she didn’t think of herself as Asian American as she was growing up. “I thought I was white. I wanted to fit in,” she said.
“I probably spent the first twenty years of my life wanting to be as American as possible.”
Maya loved school. “I studied like crazy,” she said. “I was a Class A nerd.” While she was still a student in Athens High School, she took courses in computers and science at the university. She got straight As in everything except for one subject: gym. She despised it and failed.
In most classes Maya wound up as teacher’s pet. As a result, she says, “the other kids probably hated me. I didn’t have any friends.” Instead she enjoyed hanging out with her teachers. She and her chemistry teacher, Miss McCallan, stayed after school and did experiments. “One time I made this incredible powder, flash powder, and I made way too much of it,” recalled Maya gleefully. “And it exploded!” The sound the explosion made was so loud that Maya and Miss McCallan temporarily went deaf. The head science teacher stormed in and said, “What did I just hear?” The two culprits said innocently, “Nothing. We didn’t hear anything.”
Maya didn’t fit in at high school. She wore no makeup and didn’t date. Her long hair fell down to her knees. She looked younger than kids her age. “I was the smallest in my class,” she recalled. “I was half the weight of everyone else.”
She and her brother stayed close to home. “We always ate dinner with our parents,” she said. “We weren’t going to the proms or going to the football games.”
By her senior year Maya was counting the days till she could leave Athens and go to college. On a lark she applied to Yale, an Ivy League school, never thinking she’d get in. No student from Athens High School had ever gone there. But to Maya’s surprise she was accepted. So in the fall of 1977 she eagerly took off for New Haven, Connecticut.
